Innovative wearable interfaces: an exploratory analysis of paper-based interfaces with camera-glasses device unit

The new ubiquitous interaction methods change people’s life and facilitate their tasks in everyday life and in the workplace, enabling people to access their personal data as well as public resources at any time and in any place. We found two solutions to enable ubiquitous interaction and put a stop to the limits imposed by the desktop mode: namely nomadism and mobility. Based on these two solutions, we have proposed three interfaces (Zhou et al. in HCI international 2011: human–computer interaction. Interaction techniques and environments, Springer, Berlin, pp 500–509, 2011): in-environment interface (IEI), environment dependent interface (EDI), and environment independent interface (EII). In this paper, we first discuss an overview of IEI, EDI, and EII, before excluding IEI and focusing on EDI and EII, their background, and distinct characteristics. We also propose a continuum from physical paper-based interface to digital projected interface in relation with EDI and EII. Then, to validate EDI and EII concepts, we design and implement a MobilePaperAccess system, which is a wearable camera-glasses system with paper-based interface and original input techniques allowing mobile interaction. Furthermore, we discuss the evaluation of the MobilePaperAccess system; we compare two interfaces (EDI and EII) and three input techniques (finger input, mask input, and page input) to test the feasibility and usability of this system. Both the quantitative and qualitative results are reported and discussed. Finally, we provide the prospects and our future work for improving the current approaches.